Using food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. In Eat This Podcast, Jeremy Cherfas tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion -- you get the picture. We don't do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics. Twice nominated for a James Beard Award.
One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that involves leavened grain. At one level, the search means that the house gets an extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year. At another, there are associations that equate ridding the house of chametz with ridding the mind of ego and other spiritual concerns. But what exactly is chametz? In trying to get to some sort of “truth” I discovered that there can be no right or wrong answer, only opinions, more or less persuasive, more or less accepted. In the end, the meaning of chametz rests on history and tradition, and new traditions are possible.
The last supper was a Passover Seder, and for two thousand years Passover and Easter have been linked. The links, however, are complex, which is why I am taking the opportunity to expand on a five-year-old episode.
The rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, although always open to interpretation and evolution. And yet, although different Christian traditions have their ritual Easter foods, there don’t seem to be any universals. The episode looks at these two contrasting aspects of ritual foods.
First, I talked to Susan Weingarten talks about the Seder dinner and especially an item essential on the Passover table that is not mentioned in God’s original instructions for the last supper of the Israelites in Egypt. While nobody knows how it came to be, every Jewish culture has its own version of haroset and its own idea of what it means.
Edna Holmgren and her daughter Lois Long at the Hall of Fame celebration in 1988Then, I spoke to Lois Long about a recipe made famous by her mother, Edna M. Holmgren. Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs won the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1969. Later, they were expropriated by some Christians to retell the story of the resurrection, though personally I doubt they will ever become universal.
This copy of Edna Holmgren’s recipe is not quite the original. Lois Long told me that “the flour in the cinnamon sugar mixture was Pillsbury’s idea. I cut it down to 1 tbsp but I don’t like it. The original recipe has no flour.” I do wonder what it is there for. Possibly to soak up melting gooeyness, because many of the comments on the Hall of Fame website are complaints about the mess if the pastry isn’t very carefully sealed.
Malta, just off the coast of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean, has always been of enormous strategic importance. As a result it has been claimed, and fought over, by empire after empire. Each time it was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food supplies because the tiny island — Malta is only 27 kilometres long — cannot possibly feed itself. Despite this history, going into World War II neither the British colonial government nor the Maltese people were prepared for the inevitable blockade. When rationing was imposed, however, the authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to those who were finding ways to evade the restrictions of the black market. It made sense to do so, as I heard from Maltese historian Noel Buttigieg.
Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world. The main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the diet, and in 1991, the UK’s Medical Research Council halted a trial of folic acid supplementation early because it was obvious that the supplement was preventing a large number of cases. At the time, the trial’s authors concluded: “public health measures should be taken to ensure that the diet of all women who may bear children contains an adequate amount of folic acid.”
The United States was relatively quick to act, mandating flour be fortified with folic acid in 1998, followed by around 80 countries worldwide. Countries with mandatory fortification have seen a drop in neural tube defects of between one third and one half. But not the European Union nor, until recently, the United Kingdom.
The European Union concedes: “There has been no real progress in preventing NTDs in Europe since folic acid supplementation was shown to be an effective preventive measure.”
Finally, the UK has put forward proposals to fortify white flour, but many doctors say they could do much more. Europe is still to act.
Anthony MongielloA recent documentary tells the story of how a kid from Brooklyn invented the stuffed crust pizza, sued Pizza Hut for ripping him off, and lost. It is a fascinating story, and left me in no doubt about who actually invented the stuffed crust pizza: Anthony Mongiello, that kid from Brooklyn. But it was the incidental asides Anthony dropped in the documentary, along with a look at Formaggio Cheese, the company he built, that really made me want to talk to him about his family of cheese engineers and his own history as a cheese inventor.
Harry RobsonSix thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food, and those pots have now revealed that in many respects the diets of the two cultures were more alike than different. The hunter-gatherers were processing dairy foods, while the farmers were cooking fish and other aquatic resources.
That’s the conclusion of a massive study of more than 1000 pot fragments by 30 scientists. Harry Robson, one of the team leaders, explained the results and the light they shed onto the transition to farming.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the average baby wouldn’t have a tooth in its head for another five or six months. Amy Bentley, a professor at New York University, has charted the rise and continuing rise of baby food, from its earliest emergence in upstate New York and Michigan to its proliferation today. Commercial baby foods made sense, she thinks, as a safer and more convenient alternative to home-made options, and still today may form the bedrock of the best-nourished period of a child’s life. But they also reflected an American exceptionalism rooted in the triumph of World War Two.
The adorable infant in Gerber’s advertisements was originally a pencil sketch that the artist said she would finish in colour if selected. Gerber preferred the sketch, and “repeated requests” prompted the company to offer a reproduction, suitable for framing, in exchange for 10¢. Strangest of all, some people seemed to think the baby was Humphrey Bogart, who was 29 qwhen the sketch was made. A little old for baby food.
In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elusive contribution to flavour, best described as “you know it when it’s missing”.
Priya Mani eventually identified the strange thing in her soup as a lichen called Parmotrema perfolatum, commonly known in English as black stoneflower. Lichens are an odd group of plants made up of algae or bacteria living within the cells of a fungus. You’ve seen them on rocks and trees, I’m sure. Black stoneflower turns out to be ubiquitous in Indian cooking, though its presence is not often remarked. Its popularity may now be threatening its survival.
The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize, and a lot of work to understand the genetic changes from teosinte to maize. The big problem was that the genetic work also seemed to contradict the story, by finding remnants of different types of teosinte. A new research paper sorts out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding.
Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is defrauding customers, and yet there is very little public outrage, except in the immediate wake of yet another revelation of wrong-doing. Honey adulteration is nothing new, as I heard from historian Matt Phillpott, who has been studying the practice ancient and modern.
Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop Type 2 Diabetes. But while nutritionists were happy to recommend (low-fat) yoghurt, which seemed to offer similar protection, nowhere was ice-cream mentioned. David Johns wrote that article, and had previously looked into guidelines on cutting salt and the Big Sugar anti-fat conspiracy that never was. An interesting person to talk to about the intersection between nutrition science and public policy.
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